WASHINGTON - California Democrat Dianne
Feinstein will begin her fourth full term as a U.S. senator much as she
started her Senate career: fighting for a ban on assault weapons.

Feinstein's new bill, which will be introduced Thursday in the Senate, among other things proposes to:

Ban
the sale, transfer, importation or manufacturing of about 150 named
firearms, plus certain rifles, handguns and shotguns fitted for
detachable magazines and having at least one military characteristic.

Strengthen the 1994 ban by moving from a two- to a one-characteristic test to determine what constitutes an assault weapon.

Ban firearms with "thumbhole stocks" and "bullet buttons."

Ban the importation of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.

Ban high-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.

The
bill would grandfather in weapons legally owned on the day of enactment
and exempts over 900 specific weapons "used for hunting or sporting
purposes."

Feinstein first got involved with gun control 34 years
ago, when San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the
nation's first openly gay elected official, were murdered by disgruntled
former city supervisor Dan White.

"I became mayor as a product of assassination," she told USA TODAY.

While
county supervisor and mayor, Feinstein said, she saw "up-close and
personal the death and destruction that these guns carry with them."

"I
have watched these incidents from 1966, which was the first one, the
Texas bell tower, and watched it go through school after school,
business after business, law firm after law firm," she said. In 1966,
former Marine Charles Whitman killed 14 people and wounded 32 others
while shooting from atop the tower on the University of Texas campus in
Austin.

But it was a mass shooting at a law firm in a San
Francisco high-rise in 1993 that began her long push against the
availability of assault weapons; the first version became law in 1994
and expired in 2004.

"I have worked on this for a long time," she said. "I'm not a newcomer or a novice to guns."

Feinstein
has pushed to renew the assault-weapons ban ever since it expired in
2004, but the murder of 20 children and six adults last month at Sandy
Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., has given it an unfortunate new
relevance, she said.

The issue has made her a frequent opponent of
the National Rifle Association, a group she says goes "out of their way
to develop hate toward anyone that does have a different view than
they."

"The NRA sort of specialized in trying to denigrate me, but
I don't think there's anyone around that's spent 20 years on this
subject, plus some," she said.

This year's effort will be as hard,
if not harder, than the last time the bill became law, particularly
because Republicans control the House.

"It is an uphill battle all the way," she said. "That doesn't mean the battle shouldn't be waged."

Although the NRA frequently calls Feinstein hostile to gun rights, she said she supports the Second Amendment.

In fact, when a terrorist group targeted her in 1976, she bought a gun to protect herself.

"They
put a bomb at my house, shot out windows of the beach house," she said
in a recent interview. "I got a permit from the chief of police and was
instructed in a handgun which was a five-shot revolver, a .38 special
for myself."

She never used the gun, she said, and eventually had
it melted down with other weapons and forged into a cross to give to
Pope John Paul II as a gift.

"I don't think it can
get much worse than Sandy Hook school," she said. "And the numbers of
bullets used, the damage done to these little bodies. ... It is
absolutely horror and it should not happen in America."